Why do you converse?

[Karlos]

motorollin wrote:
I have become interested in the reasons why people engage in superfluous conversation. I don't mean communicating with others with some intent, such as sharing or requesting information, rather "small-talk".

I don't know. What I do know is that I do a lot less of it at the moment and I think it's certainly contributory in part to my current moodiness.

[Karlos]

bloodline wrote:

Which is the symptom, which is the cause?

I think it's a symptom but it has a feedback effect and thus contributes to the cause.

[Karlos]

Daft as it may sound, I'm actually making myself take some time to post here in order to counter this very problem...

[Karlos]

bloodline wrote:

Karlos wrote:
Daft as it may sound, I'm actually making myself take some time to post here in order to counter this very problem...

A.org therapy? Wayne should charge...

As long as it isn't per post...

[Karlos]

*sigh*

Pity Fluffy, Kenny, Meerschaum etc aren't here these days. Fun banter was guarenteed :-)

Still, it's good to see that some old faces remain :-)

[Karlos]

I wonder what Kenny's post count would be if he were still around :roflmao:

[Karlos]

bloodline wrote:

Should be quite easy to work out! But I'm not going to... I spent enough time figuring out that stupid Paula calibration file :-)

Come on, that must have been easier to do than what you originally proposed ;-)

[Karlos]

Speelgoedmannetje wrote:

Karlos wrote:
*sigh*

Pity Fluffy, Kenny, Meerschaum etc aren't here these days. Fun banter was guarenteed :-)

Still, it's good to see that some old faces remain :-)

Fluffy's still veeeery regularly on Whyzzat...

Yeah. Somehow I couldn't get away with the place though. Don't get me wrong, it's nice enough but I guess I got too used to how things work here.

[Karlos]

I didn't say your method wouldn't work. It just might have been more difficult to do and could be more error prone...

Did you do anything with the result yet?

[Karlos]

Is it basically a compander-like curve applied to the input then?

[Karlos]

I see :-)

The one thing I was never quite sure about was how the non-linearity of paula's audio worked. What I mean is, was it the absolute output voltage that was affected by the curve directly or was it the change in successive sample output voltages that were affected by the curve?

If it's the former, a simple lookup table converting input sample to output sample is fine, but if it's the latter you need to basically keep track of the previous input sample and apply the lookup to the difference between the current sample and the previous sample.

In both cases, the second thing I wondered about was the effect of the inbuilt amplifier, but that's a wee bit beyond the scope of the discussion, unless realtime FIR filtering etc is your bang :-)

[Karlos]

Just to complicate it a little further, do we know exactly how the 6-bit channel volume is applied on Paula?

I've noticed that, with proper amplification of the output, you can still playback an 8-bit sample at a channel volume setting of 1 with much more precision than you'd expect of a simple 8-bit DAC.

So, does the volume premultiply the sample before sending it to a DAC that has 14-bit actual resolution, or is the analogue output of the DAC fed through a particularly stable volume control? If it's the latter, I don't expect the volume control is particularly linear, either.

I got the impression that 14-bit replay tricks play the most significant 8-bit portion of a 16-bit sample word on one channel at full volume then the next 6-bits of the 16-bit sample word on the other channel at minimum volume.

I'll probably have to do some testing of my own now :-D

-edit-

Unfortunately I'm far too busy trying to persuade my crust old FM synth to reproduce the metallic effects from the first half of Hybrid's remix of "Everything in it's right place"...

[Karlos]

bloodline wrote:

I really really don't like FM synth :-D

Trying to recreate natural sounds with FM synthesis is both missing the point and a lost cause. I enjoy it for what it is, a method of producing unnatural sounds that can be realtime controlled in a way no wavetable/sampler can achieve.

[Karlos]

bloodline wrote:

In my own code, I split the 16bit sample into two bytes. The Most significant byte played at full volume (63) in one channel. The least significant byte played at minimum volume (1) on the other channel. It seemed to work... I didn't realise about the volume thing at first... and the noise was horrible :-)

Perhaps I was supposed to shift the least significant byte by two places... but I didn't...

I'd have thought that's a prerequisite, since you'd need the LSB to be played at 1/256th the level of the MSB for a perfectly linear channel volume. As the real volume level is only 6-bits, the top 2 significant bits of your LSB will basically overlap the 2 least significant bits of your MSB producing quite noticeable noise :-?

Of course, if Paula's volume is some freaky logarithmic scale it's possible that 1/256th of "full" volume is achievable with some low volume setting.

[Karlos]

bloodline wrote:
Poo to the FM synth...

Ok, I'm being a bit facetious, I did manage to create a really dark spiky bass sound with a DX7 in a studio once... which was so good I sampled it on my W-30 so I could use it (Yamaha's MIDI support sucked).

The trick is not necessarily trying to understand how it works (really, it's phase modulation rather than frequency modulation but it amounts to the same thing) and just playing with it.

I've managed to create many interesting pads, effects and bass sounds ranging from basic sinusoidal speaker shakers to deeply resonant and dirty pulses. Unfortunately my kit is limited, getting old and noisy. I'm contemplating getting the DX150 (DX7 on a card) plugin for my MU100 to replace the  vocoder I never use :-)